NORMAN08_009_LH.JPG �� The 4-story tall crush-glass mural at San Francisco's Masonic Auditorium, created by Big Sur sculptor Emile Norman, is about to be restored abfter 50 years. Photographed by Liz Hafalia on 11/3/05 in San Francisco, California. SFC Creditted to the San Francisco Chronicle/Liz Hafalia

Photo: Liz Hafalia

NORMAN08_009_LH.JPG �� The 4-story tall crush-glass mural at...

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NORMAN08_034_LH.JPG �� The 4-story tall crush-glass mural at San Francisco's Masonic Auditorium, created by Big Sur sculptor Emile Norman, is about to be restored abfter 50 years. Photographed by Liz Hafalia on 11/3/05 in San Francisco, California. SFC Creditted to the San Francisco Chronicle/Liz Hafalia

Photo: Liz Hafalia

NORMAN08_034_LH.JPG �� The 4-story tall crush-glass mural at...

It's lively and colorful, but a mural depicting history is showing its age

Whenever Emile Norman walks into the stately Masonic Memorial Temple atop San Francisco's Nob Hill, he marvels at the huge decorative mural window that fills the south wall of the white-marble lobby.

"How the hell did I do that?" said Norman, a modest, 87-year-old Big Sur artist who made the intricately composed crushed-glass and acrylic mural nearly 50 years ago. It's the biggest and best-known work of his long career.

Commissioned in 1955 by the California Masons for the massive white building that opened three years later, Norman spent about two years creating the luminous 38-by-48-foot mural that celebrates the Masons' role in the development of California. Using an innovative technique he invented and called "endomosaic" -- he sandwiched images made with glass, fabric, metal, shells and dirt between two sheets of translucent plastic -- the artist depicted sailors and farmers and fishermen, covered wagons, steamships, oil derricks, cattle, picks, ice tongs, strawberries and hearts, among other objects. Then there are the age-old Masonic symbols like the trowel, the compass and square, the beehive and a giant, all-seeing eye.

Composed of 45 panels trucked up from Norman's Big Sur studio and installed in a steel grid, the mural has held up pretty well over the decades. But moisture and the sun's ultraviolet rays have caused enough damage that the Masons are undertaking a $400,000 restoration of the giant colored window. The work is expected to begin in the spring, after the rainy season.

The San Francisco firm Architectural Resources Group has been engaged to restore the mural, which is marred here and there by smudges and discoloration. There are small cracks in some of the acrylic panels, and some of the design material -- the pros call it tesserae -- between the acrylic sheets has slipped out of place. The polymer adhesive that holds all the parts together has been broken down by sun and rain.

The most noticeable damage is in the big yellow eye; bits of glass from the blue iris have become unglued and slipped down a few inches. Norman says it's crying.

"We've identified 12 panels that need to come out and be worked on," said ARG's David Wessel, the principal in charge of this project (the firm's conservation company is also restoring the Watts Towers in Los Angeles).

Those 250-pound panels will be removed from their frame with suction cups and other tools used to remove big sheets of glass, then hoisted over the interior balcony and brought into a conservation lab being set up on the second floor. Conservators will drill tiny holes in the panels, push the tesserae back into place with piano wire, affix it with adhesive injected through a syringe, then seal up the hole. They'll stand on scaffolding to repair and clean the 33 panels that don't have to come out. In addition, the giant acrylic screen on the exterior balcony meant to protect the mural from the elements will be completely replaced. Rear lighting will be installed that will "really make the mural come alive in the evening," Wessel said.

Like thousands of others, he'd admired the mural while attending concerts at the Masonic but never knew much about it. Now he does. One of the things he loves about the piece is its use of plastics, a relatively new material at the time. "It's a wonderful expression of that technology born into an art form of the period," Wessel said.

Norman is a self-taught artist who grew up on a ranch in the Southern California town of Whittier, where he came across choice stones to carve while riding his horse, and where his father pegged Richard Nixon, another townie, as a sneak when the future disgraced president was a teen. Norman began experimenting with acrylic several years before he undertook the Masonic project. He developed his endomosaic technique while designing window displays for Bergdorf-Goodman in New York and making shoji-like screens.

He used the method to create a mural at Monterey's Casa Munras Hotel depicting the history of Monterey. It caught the eye of architect Albert Roller, who was designing the Masonic Temple in San Francisco. Roller sought out Norman in Big Sur.

"I came up to San Francisco and talked to the brethren, and they gave me 15 books to read about the Masons," Norman recalled at the Masonic the other day. Dressed in a lavender blazer and khakis, a lavender beret and lavender high-top Converse sneakers -- "I wore purple diapers as a baby," joked the artist, who was never in the closet about being gay -- he was being honored at an event publicizing the fundraising campaign to restore the mural. The proceedings included a 12-minute clip of a documentary about Norman being made by Mill Valley filmmaker Will Parrinello. It's being produced by actors Jill Eikenberry and Michael Tucker, friends and admirers of Norman's who have a house in Big Sur next to his. Norman's place is filled with sculpture and the sound of Bach, which the artist plays on the organ.

After getting to know something about the Masonic brotherhood, Norman, who says he wasn't supposed to talk about the Masonic symbols he depicted, created an extraordinarily detailed model of the mural. The Masons saw it and were sold. They also commissioned him to sculpt the bold figures on the marble frieze on the Taylor Street facade. He went to Carrara, Italy, to do it.

"The Masonic brethren were very good to me," said the artist, who's a little hard of hearing but still has all his cookies. The acacia trees on either side of his mural are rooted in soil from every California county and Hawaii. The dirt was given to him by Masons from each county. "I used that soil in the bottom to make it more personal for them, and they appreciated it."

Elsewhere there are seashells and stones mixed in with colored glass and acrylic. There's fabric, too, some covered with glass powder, in the trousers of the fishermen and miners.

"I'm an experimenter," said Norman, whose papa whupped him when he was 11 for wrecking the old man's chisels carving a granite face, but endorsed his son's talent when he saw the finished product. The artist said his mother never understood who he was. Norman has done many murals for private homes but turned down an offer to create one six times the size of the San Francisco job for a Dallas cathedral. It was just too big. The Masonic Temple mural was made with the help of his partner of 30 years, Brooks Clement, whose name appears on the lower right side beneath his. A promoter of Norman's work who opened a Carmel gallery that sold the artist's gently abstracted depictions of fish, birds and dolphins, Clement died of cancer in 1973. Just before he did, he told Norman he didn't know where he was going, but assured him that wherever it was, "I'll get you a job in the art department."

That would be fine with Norman, who works every day in his studio, often staying at it till 3 a.m. "If I stop doing artwork," he said, "just call 911."